One of the supplemental readings this semester was Teri Lesesne’s Naked Reading, Uncovering What Tweens Need to Become Lifelong Readers. It’s a great book, and one that I would recommend to parents and to teachers on teens. Some of the elements I particularly appreciate are her descriptions of “unconscious delight,” “reading autobiographically,” and “vicarious experience.” In all of my years as a student, a reader, and a teacher, I don’t think I’ve ever reflected so much on the reading process as I did this semester. Lesesne argues that it is, “Our challenge as educators is to help all of our students see their lives reflected in the pages of a book. The diversity of a collection, whether in a classroom or a school library is essential if students are to be able to read autobiographically” (19). Naked Reading has helped me broaden my concept of what it means to be an English teacher. I know that we won’t be able to force all of our students to love reading. But we might be able to introduce them to books and genres that may appeal to variety of student populations.
Lesesne also discusses the power of reading aloud in our classrooms, which was a concept that really appealed to my classmates. I think it’s certainly true that there is an emphasis on reading aloud in early childhood education and elementary education, and somehow between middle and high school students are implicitly taught that they now need to read to themselves. I remember having a college professor who frequently read aloud to our class. They were only short excerpts, but I loved hearing her read. Part of it was that she had a cool British accent, but also, I think I was able to pick up on different things when she read to us that I did not pick up reading to myself. As I begin teaching, I will do my best to incoporate reading aloud into my class, even if it's just a few sentences here and there.
Our readings and the corresponding discussions on censorship stick out in my mind. I’ve always been pretty liberal about what I read and what I’ve assigned in past semesters, but I’ve never had to deal with parents the way I know I will when I start teaching high school. I am currently observing at Denver School of the Arts. The parent and student populations there are unique, in that most of the parents tend to be very involved and are still generally quite socially and politically liberal. My cooperating teacher tends to use any material she wants, so long as she feels it adds value to the class. I recently sat in on a 11th and 12th-grade Aesthetics class. During the class, she showed a clip from the movie American Beauty, wherein every character repeated the "F-word" multiple times. This was surprising to me in light of our class discussions on censorship. The chapter on censorship discusses the element of “community pressure.” I think in a more liberal community, like the one at DSA, teachers may have more freedom to select material that a more conservative community might oppose. I chatted with her briefly after class and she admitted that she’s never had a parent complain about her course content or book selections. This would probably not be the case at a school in Colorado Springs. I remember one of my classmates (Levi) saying during our discussion, "why are we all so worried about justifying the books we want to teach?" I was glad when he raised this question, and I might adopt it as my new mantra.
